The biggest winners and losers of last night's SmackDown (October 23)

Last night's SmackDown was never going to surpass the power of Raw this week, but it felt like it didn't even try. In contrast to recent form, the blue brand put out a decidedly poor showing. It was easily the worst SmackDown of the past few months at least, if not the post WrestleMania 34 landscape in total.

As a go home show to Evolution, it performed even worse. SmackDown actually made me less interested for Evolution on Sunday, not more. While Raw tried, it looked like SmackDown was trying to make the audience not care to see the pay per view. Most of the promotion went to the embarrassing Crown Jewel event, showing where WWE's true priorities lie.

Nevertheless, let's go over SmackDown and see what emerged from this disappointing drag of a show.

Losers: AJ Styles and Daniel Bryan

WWE's idea of progressing with a build toward a true dream match was doing the exact same match that they did last week, with the exact same outcome that came as a result of the exact same shenanigans.

Sorry, but this was boring.

This is where WWE's formulaic programming really drags and can even make the viewing audience less excited for a match of the caliber of AJ Styles vs. Daniel Bryan.

Raw has been much lambasted over the past few months for repeating the same matches week in and week out, but SmackDown repeated that formulation this time, and it should be criticized for it.

AJ Styles and Daniel Bryan can do a lot more than this. It's time for WWE to actually put effort into feuds like this. That might be a shocking proposition, but there's no other alternative, especially if they want to keep their audience around for when SmackDown jumps to Fox.